Had they been in the Louvre or the Uffizi, Titian’s paintings inspired by Ovid – the so-called poesies – would undoubtedly be among the world’s best known paintings. As it is, the series of seven has been distributed around the world, with two of the key works hanging in British private collections since the late 18th century.

If a 70-year stint on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland hardly constitutes languishing in obscurity, it kept Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto on the relative margins of the art map. But since the furore surrounding their proposed sale by the Duke of Sutherland in 2008, and their subsequent acquisition for the nation at an eye-watering £95 million, they have started to get around a bit more – seen first at the National Gallery in London, with further displays imminent. Their status and renown, and that of the whole series of seven paintings, have therefore risen enormously and will no doubt go on growing.

These are paintings that push storytelling through paint to the limit, that were designed by the Venetian master as manifestos for his chosen craft. Their rhythmic flow of lustrous female flesh was designed to show that painting could be as complex and multi-layered in its meanings as poetry — then considered the highest of the arts. And if that sounds a touch rarefied, their retellings of Ovid’s often grisly tales of transformation make an immediate impact. The mingled horror and delight with which the hunter Actaeon confronts the goddess Diana and her nymphs lingers in the mind, particularly when you know the fate that awaits him — to be turned into a stag and ripped to pieces by his own hounds.

This exhibition reunites Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto with another of the series, The Death of Actaeon, for the first time since the 18th century. Yet far from being seen in isolation, they are part of an exhibition of contemporary “responses”, Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. In this exhibition, we see works by contemporary artists Chris Ofili, Conrad Shawcross and Mark Wallinger relating to designs they have created for newly commissioned Titian-inspired ballets at the Royal Opera House. These, in turn, have generated scores by some of the country’s leading composers and, in case it escaped your notice, there has also been a book of Titian-inspired poetry, with contributions from writers of the order of Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Carol Anne Duffy.

With this great flurry of cross-disciplinary activity, there’s the danger that the qualities of the paintings themselves will be lost sight of. Indeed, anyone entertaining the cynical view that Titian has been hijacked into a callow exercise in national cultural branding is likely to have their suspicions confirmed as they enter this exhibition.

Related Articles

Titian’s paintings are grouped in the first room, with Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto framing a doorway through which a kinetic sculpture by Conrad Shawcross dominates the space. Rather than being treated as the central meat of the exhibition, the Titians appear reduced to the level of introductory contextual material — “old stuff” to be responded to by today’s top talent, who are, by implication, inevitably sexier and more relevant.

Yet if this division between “old art” and “contemporary art” feels facile and irksome, there’s nothing wrong in principle with Titian's work being brought into contact with the art of today. Indeed, that is in many ways the best thing for it to be doing. And if the National Gallery had to involve contemporary artists, they could have done a lot worse than the three whose works appear here.

Mark Wallinger’s installation is approached through darkness, with spy holes giving views into a modern bathroom. Looking through a frosted window, we detect the movement of living flesh, and as we crane up towards the broken corner of the window, a naked woman becomes visible going through her ablutions: showering, combing her hair. We glimpse her from other angles, through a keyhole, a louvred door and a two-way mirror, oblivious to our gaze. Employing volunteer members of the public — all of them named Diana — in two-hour shifts, this is a work to make a voyeur of the most puritanical gallery goer, and make them laugh out loud at the same time . A brilliant play on Diana and Actaeon, it confirms Wallinger as probably the wittiest artist working in Britain.

Conrad Shawcross takes a similarly conceptual approach in response to The Death of Actaeon. A robotic arm moves in a kind of abstract dance, manipulating a point of white light around a single stag’s antler. The light brings to mind Diana’s associations with the moon, while the antler represents the stag into which Actaeon is turned and hunted down by the goddess. The relationship between the two objects remains evocative but somewhat opaque, until we learn that the movements of the arm are based on those of the dancer playing Diana, and the antler, formed from a block containing hardwoods — representing a forest — was actually carved by the computerised arm. It’s an intriguing idea, but once you’ve absorbed it, you’re left wondering where you’re supposed to go with it.

Admitting himself “paralysed” at the prospect of confronting Titian, Chris Ofili has gone back to Ovid’s poems, transferring their Olympian world to the lush landscapes of Trinidad, where he lives, in a series of paintings whose rather sugary colours bring a touch of carnival.

A nymph reclines in a palm-fringed waterfall; a bedraggled hunter figure wields a huge phallus, reflecting Ofili’s view that the real subject of the Actaeon story is castration. If the forms have the non-committal quality of much contemporary painting — as though Ofili didn’t want to let on quite how serious he wants to be — the application of the paint, in overlain dripping veils, evokes the fleshly qualities that fascinated both Ovid and Titian.

Inevitably, your eye keeps being drawn back towards Titian’s paintings. Seen in this context, they appear all the more extraordinary. Their physical richness and narrative directness are things that art doesn’t provide in our age of oblique and generally tentative views. Indeed, if the other artists here haven’t been able to do more than nibble the edges of what Titian’s paintings have to offer, that in itself is a kind of tribute.